Olympic/Lego Fever

I don't know about you but the Olympics have been a fixture in our lives for the last two weeks.  Even if we've not been watching it, it's been on in the background.  Max has witnessed me shouting at the rowers, swimmers, cyclists and athletes.  He was very disappointed when we only won silver in one of the rowing events and I had to spend some time telling him about "taking part" and "trying your best" and the fact that silver meant you were the second best in the whole world!!  Somehow though I don't think he was quite convinced.

Of course for Max no event would be complete without some Lego and we have been collecting the Team GB Lego minifigures.  After some loitering in two well known supermarkets feeling all the packets for giveaway parts ("Ooo Max that's a tennis racket, we need the tennis player"), we completed the set.  To be honest I think I was more excited about completing the set than Max was....

Here are the little fellas (and the girls) in all their glory

I'm hoping that in 20 years time a full set will be worth something (!) and this got me to thinking about how we could keep them safe from the children display them and I remembered this from Pinterest so I got to work and got this frame from Ikea

And assembled these items and some superglue

As I didn't actually read the blog post before commencing on my project (as opposed to now when I am writing this post - oops!), I opted to take the glass out (although this is possibly a safer option for the kids) and painted the backing board white, although you could paint it whatever colour you wanted to fit in with your theme.

I then reassembled the frame (minus the glass) and then glued 9 pieces of 2x2 Lego blocks to the backing board.  Obviously the Lego bricks had to be red, white and blue to keep in with the Team GB theme.

The minifigures were then placed on each of the bricks and look like this

The obvious advantage is that the minifigures can still be taken off the bricks and still played with, although if Max loses any bits there will be trouble!!

Having reviewed several posts I am wondering whether this blog should be more aptly entitled "Musings from a Lego Mum"......

And lo yet more Lego appeared...

I mentioned in my last post that it was Max's birthday recently and inevitably that meant an influx of new Lego (can anyone say "spoilt child"??!!), including (but not limited to) a police station, truck, helicopter and several pieces from the new Dino range.

Now there's nothing I like more than a bit of good organising and all this Lego left me thinking how on earth we were going to store the damn stuff.  Short of using all the Lego (and trust me there's enough) to construct a shed for it in the back garden, some consideration needed to be given to the layout of Max's bedroom and the storage options available.  Max has two Ikea units in his bedroom, one being used for all his books and some random toys/dressing up stuff and the other for Lego.  The Lego unit left a lot be desired as all the Lego was housed so most of it couldn't be seen.  I had previously googled "Lego" for an image, when I was looking for inspiration for Max's birthday cake, and I came across a blog post which of course I can no longer find but this one is similar.  As one of the storage units in Max's bedroom is the Trofast one (the one with the books/random toys on) it seemed sensible to have a shift about.

So the art easel (which Max no longer uses but Penelope is obsessed with) was moved into Penelope's room.  Then the books all moved across to the other storage unit, after the younger books were weeded out and moved onto Penelope's bookcase.  Penelope got as much out of this as Max did.

At this point a trip to Ikea was required to acquire some storage bags and some more of the drawers that fit in the Trofast system.  And, as is inevitable with a trip to Ikea, several other non-essential items also acquired - seriously how do they do it??

After bringing home all the essential and non-essential (but seemed it at the time) items, I moved all his dressing up stuff into a storage bag under his bed and redistributed the random toys to other storage units about the house, the loft and some charity bags.

At this point I needed to name the drawers so after using a bit of WordArt on the computer, and shading the WordArt the appropriate colour some drawer names were created and then laminated using my bargain laminator from Tesco.  How can they sell a laminator for only £12??  After a bit lot of sorting out individual Lego bricks Max's Trofast system now looks like this

The larger bottom drawers have a colour theme whereas the two smaller top drawers contain mini-figures and also the tinier more technical bits which would never be found again if they went in the colour coded drawers.

I have even arranged all the instruction booklets in some lever arch files (top left of the photo above) but do confess to having got slightly carried away by laminating an index of the booklets and putting it on the front of the files.....

Max was very pleased with this turn of events

The brilliant thing about this is that it has made the Lego much more accessible to Max and he has already built lots more things just because he can see all the bits.  I had suggested to him that we could break up all the built pieces but that was a step too far for a five year old.  Instead he has satisfied himself with taking apart a piece at a time and then immediately rebuilding it.  Lego - the toy that keeps on giving!!

And, having posted a photo of my efforts on Facebook, a certain person at Two Owls Design also arranged some Lego in a similar fashion, albeit without the lamination - although I have offered my services.

Now if I could just work out where to put all the Lego that is currently residing on our dining table I could call all this organisation a success.....